Habitations, page 24
“Stop your bullshit,” Ameya said. “You were the one who wanted the Waldorf School. Sending Priya to every corner of the city for social emotional tests and IQ tests.”
Vishal shrugged, ignoring the point. “I’m happy with whatever Priya’s happy with. She tells me what forms to fill out and I fill them out.” He leaned back on the blanket and propped his head up, as though they were on a beach. Vega found his manner even more irritating than she found Priya’s—a man who wanted the outcomes, but not the optics of pursuing them. That work, he left to his wife.
* * *
In New Jersey, there had been subtle reminders of racial difference—salespeople who spoke too brightly and too slowly, or the turbaned gas station attendants who addressed her quietly in Hindi, like India was a shameful secret they shared. But in Baton Rouge, the divide was stark and unapologetic. Yard signs reading Save St. Marks, flanked her neighboring houses. Vega had assumed it was something innocuous, maybe a nursing home or library program facing budget cuts, until a flier appeared in her mailbox. The Save St. Marks neighborhood association believes in creating a community and independent school district within East Baton Rouge, made up of like-minded and law-abiding citizens. Daphne, a neighbor whose son attended Asha’s day care, offered her analysis one morning in the parking lot. “We have to clean up our schools here. People who earn more are paying more in property taxes. But families from other parts of East Baton Rouge are able to enroll their kids in our schools, because of the way districts are drawn.” She lowered her voice, though there was nobody else within earshot. “You’ve seen the local elementary school. Do you really think you’d send Asha there?”
Vega had liked Daphne. She seemed straightforward—a woman who worked in human resources, who wore sensible shoes, who seemed always to be carting one of her older children to soccer or ballet. During Vega’s first carless weeks in Baton Rouge, Daphne had driven her back and forth from campus. Now, Vega stared at her blankly. “Do you mean because it’s predominantly Black?” She had passed the school countless times, but after years in New York, where Black and white children seemed to rarely overlap, the racial demographics hadn’t surprised her. And who was she to question any of it? She had spent her life in parochial schools, where she could count on one hand the number of her classmates who weren’t Brahmin.
“Not at all. I’m talking about the quality of the schools. I don’t care if people are red or purple or green.”
“But people aren’t red or purple or green. They’re brown and Black and white. Somebody could plausibly say this about Asha. They could drive past a playground where she is playing and say, ‘I don’t want to send my children to school with brown children.’ ”
Daphne put her hand on Vega’s arm. “Honey, nobody would ever say that about you. And certainly not about your little girl. She’s so well-mannered.”
A few weeks earlier, Vega had been walking to her car on the north side of campus. It was a Friday, late afternoon on a beautiful day. Two men were standing near her car. “You want us to move?” one asked. From a distance, they had looked to be undergraduates. Now, she saw they were older, around their mid-twenties.
“Yes. Please.”
“Then make us move. Mexican bitch.”
Vega couldn’t recall much of what happened next, except that she managed to get into her car, collect Asha from day care, and drive home. She hadn’t yet told anyone. In part, the incident was too embarrassing to talk about. But she also suspected that, if she did mention it, she would be forced to file a complaint with campus police and begin a tedious and ultimately fruitless investigation. Now she recounted it to Daphne. “You’d be surprised. What people are willing to say aloud,” she said.
“Well, that’s horrible. Of course, wherever you go, you get some people who are trash.” Daphne was quiet for a bit, and Vega expected her to offer something conciliatory. Instead, she said, “I certainly hope you told them you aren’t Mexican.”
* * *
Her colleagues were all affable, all white, with the exception of Charles—a Black linguist in his mid-sixties who seemed indifferent to the members of the department but was revered in the sort of distant way one might admire Gandhi or Mandela. There was a large photograph of him on the department website, and everyone seemed to nod a bit too earnestly on the rare occasions he spoke. Shortly after she arrived, she learned he was a finalist for a position at Tulane. Once, during a department meeting, she saw he was completing a crossword puzzle under his desk.
The women were all childless, the men with kids and wives who they mentioned in passing, making Vega’s identity as a mother as novel as Charles’s Blackness. Of the seven, three were criminologists. “I study urban criminology,” her colleague Bert said, when he’d first introduced himself to Vega. “Debra’s work is different. She studies delinquency. Mark’s work focuses on the school-to-prison pipeline.”
“So, you’re all criminologists?” Vega had asked.
“Well, different aspects.”
She immersed herself in their research in her first weeks. Despite her interest in quantitative research, she found Bert’s and Debra’s work dry—his, an analysis of the population changes in Atlanta public housing, and hers, a discussion of juvenile recidivism in Chicago. Mark’s work, in contrast, was a painfully bleak portrait of out-of-school youth. The blurb on the cover, written by his former advisor, read: A stirring portrayal of innocence lost, and the rage that swells within our forgotten children.
She was revising her dissertation into a book, while also researching a new paper on reproductive health access among immigrant women in Louisiana. She had been proud of both projects at first, thrilled by their magnitude and importance, but she was beginning to doubt herself. In the mornings, when she reread the pages she’d written the previous day, the language sounded so sentimental, so bloated with false authority. “You have an outsider’s insight into American healthcare,” Margo had told her. “Emphasize that. Talk about the small ways in which the system narrows our choices. Nobody is willing to compare the controls placed on American women to, say, Indian women. You understand both systems.”
But Vega wasn’t sure this was true. She had visited the redesigned Mukti website and had clicked through photographs of adolescent girls holding framed awards or seated in circles with their hands raised. None of it moved her. An updated slogan read Be the Change SHE Wants to See! The German interns were featured, as was Charanya, who had been promoted to something called “chief entrepreneurship officer.”
At CUNY, teaching had been the highlight of her week. At LSU, her lectures called to mind a failing stand-up routine. She rewrote and rewrote her seminar notes, convinced with each new draft that she had found the hook to energize her students. She placed controversial questions on the board to prompt discussion when they walked in: Should women’s reproductive choices ever be governed by the state? Is marriage inherently patriarchal? Always there was a heavy and bored silence, after which the same rotation of three or four students would speak up, their points drawing only from personal experience and never from the assigned readings. I’ve known a lot of women who had abortions just because it was more convenient; Me, personally, I wouldn’t want to get married unless I found someone who really respected me. At CUNY, she would have known how to unpack this statement. “Why do we object to women making choices of convenience?” she might have asked. “Let us define respect!” But at LSU, the conversational thread was so fragile she was always afraid of breaking it, of the class descending into more painful silence.
She had a star student in her first semester, a Vietnamese American undergraduate named Sydney who wrote crisp and eloquent essays about women, labor, multigenerational families. “You really should consider doctoral work in this field,” Vega had told her during office hours. “You’re good enough to be admitted to a fully funded program.” Sydney had taken this all in, offering noncommittal responses. But one December afternoon, she’d lingered after class. “I should have mentioned. I’m actually applying to dental hygienist programs. I’m the oldest in my family. I really need something stable.”
* * *
In the spring, Vega was invited to present at a conference at Emory University. Ameya offered to watch Asha, and it would be the first time in two years Vega traveled anywhere alone. It was also her first formal invitation, the first event in which her name would appear on the agenda, in which she would be required to submit an abstract in advance. A woman named Lorraine booked her flight and hotel room, asked her to keep her receipts for reimbursement purposes, and corresponded with crisp formality (Dr. Gopalan: We are so pleased that you will be joining us.). The title of “Doctor” still thrilled her, and Vega threw herself into her research until her talk—a discussion of contraception access for South Asian immigrant women—felt meticulous and polished. But two weeks before the conference, as she practiced in front of her bedroom mirror, it all sounded stale and rehearsed. She could imagine the tepid clapping, the polite questions, the canned responses she would offer.
Lately, she had felt less of a teacher than a performer. She traded in her standard black pants and button-down shirt for long Indian skirts and kurtas, batik scarves, large gold hoops. In the classroom, her arguments became increasingly dogmatic. The more she made wild claims, stripped of all nuance, the more her students seemed to listen. “Women’s bodies are policed by the state,” she argued. “Immigrant women are doubly controlled, by gender and country of origin.” In reality, she found certain aspects of her life at LSU shockingly easy. A childcare center located on campus. A pink-and-blue-hued obstetrician’s office where they ran a battery of free screenings Vega would otherwise never have thought to ask for: cervical cancer, HPV, HIV, urinary incontinence. More and more, she tormented herself with the useless thought that, had Ashwini been born in the States, she would still be alive.
“The problem is,” she told Margo over the phone, “it sounds good, but it isn’t actually true. Wealthy South Asian immigrants have similar contraception access as wealthy white American women. It’s inaccurate to reduce it all to race.”
“Well, you need to account for culture. Different cultures face different pressures.”
“Yes, but there isn’t some singular third world culture. And if I’m speaking to a predominantly white audience, nobody is going to question anything I say. At least, not publicly.” She had a creeping sense, during department meetings, that her colleagues were on edge when she talked, gingerly agreeing just to end the conversation. Recently, she had raised the example of Sydney Nguyen. “I worry sociology is losing excellent students because they don’t see themselves reflected in our faculty.” There had been a heavy silence, and Vega felt, as she often did, that they had all arrived at a collective response and were silently deciding who among them would deliver it. “That’s certainly a valuable point to consider,” Mark said, before moving to the next agenda item.
Margo had wanted to fly down to hear Vega’s presentation, but her son and his girlfriend were in New York for a wedding, and she wanted as much time with them as she could manage. “Fingers crossed,” she said, and Vega wasn’t sure if she was referring to the conference or to her son’s visit. It stung her, again, to imagine Asha as a grown woman, passing in and out of Vega’s life, calling her only when she happened to be in town.
25
She was in the lobby of the lecture hall at Emory when she saw Naomi. They stared stiffly at each other for a few moments, Vega frozen and Naomi fidgeting with an empty water bottle. Naomi spoke first. “My god. Vega.”
They retreated to an empty corner of the room and leaned against a small, circular table.
“You look just the same,” Vega said. She had often wondered if she would ever be attracted to another woman. She had tried, once, to force some interest in one of her classmates at CUNY, a gender studies scholar named Olivia. They had gone out for lunch during Vega’s first semester, but she had found Olivia to be too much. Too aware of her femaleness, her queerness, too open about topics Vega didn’t care to discuss over a meal: the politics of sex work and sex toys and sexual repression. By the end, they had talked so much about sex that Vega had lost any desire to have it.
But with Naomi, she remembered the feeling of wanting to sink into another body, to lose herself in her. She remembered touching herself at night, too cautiously to really enjoy it, always afraid Naomi would hear her through the wall.
“I don’t know why I’m pretending I’m surprised to see you,” Naomi said. “I was at your presentation.”
“I’m glad I didn’t know you were there. I would have been too nervous.”
“I know. I was thinking of finding you earlier, but I don’t think I would have been able to give a presentation if I knew you were in the room.”
“How is your family?”
“Good enough. Daniel’s still living with them. Eddie’s still floating around. He has a good job, actually. He finished his electrician’s course. Alba has a second kid, but she’s steady. You know.”
“And you? How are you?”
“I’m at George Mason, in Virginia. It’s not the best fit, but it’s okay for now.”
She talked about the department, university politics, the size of her lectures, and the quality of her students. As she listened, Vega felt the fluttering of possibility. She imagined pulling Naomi from the drudgery of her life, driving to some midway point weekend after weekend. Eventually, they would find jobs in some small and perfect town. Naomi would be a good stepmother. Rukmini, in time, would make sense of it.
“You’re happy at LSU?”
“I don’t know what to think of it yet. I like teaching, in general. But I don’t know if I’ve found my stride. It’s either too easy or too hard. I can’t quite tell.”
“I know. It can be lonely sometimes, in a strange way. Anyway, it’s been, what, six years? Tell me about your life.”
“God. Six years.” It would be the right time to tell her about Asha, the last moment before the omission took the form of a lie. Instead, she said, “I went to a conference at Penn, once. Years ago. I was hoping I would run into you. That’s pathetic, isn’t it?”
“No, it isn’t. But why didn’t you let me know? I would have planned to meet you. It’s a big campus to hope for an accidental run-in.”
“An accidental run-in would have been more exciting.”
Naomi laughed. “Only because it would have been so unlikely.” She looked suddenly pensive. “You’re here through Sunday?”
“I am. And you?”
“Tomorrow afternoon. I’d suggest dinner, but I have this obligation tonight. A friend of mine from Austin, who lives here, is hosting a film screening at his place. It’s just a small gathering. I would skip, but I already committed.” She paused, expectantly. “Maybe join me. And then, afterwards we’ll see.”
The two final words compelled Vega. She had no interest in a film screening, or a small gathering of Naomi’s friends. But the thought of what could come after was thrilling.
For the rest of the afternoon, Vega moved through the motions of the conference, going from lecture to coffee reception to panel discussion. When people spoke to her, she nodded and tried to appear interested in the conversation, but she was always scanning the room, always aware of Naomi’s presence.
In the evening, Naomi approached her and touched her arm. They walked across the parking lot, almost wordlessly, to Naomi’s rental car, then pulled out of campus, towards what Vega assumed to be downtown Atlanta. “So, where are we going, precisely?”
“My friend Tony’s screening his film. He’s actually doing his doctoral work here. This is his first film, and it received some acclaim. It’s kind of a deviation from what he originally set out to do. He used to be obsessed with German cinema. When we were in Austin, he used to come over and make me watch Fassbinder films with him. Do you know Fassbinder?”
“I don’t.”
“You’re not missing much. Anyway, Tony’s decent. And I think fairly talented.”
Twenty minutes or so later, they parked on a street that blended blight and opulence, in the manner Vega could never get used to about American cities. There was a gas station on the corner that appeared to have been gutted, though people still milled about, a few relaxing on the cement floor as though it were a public park. They continued past a sushi bar, a dank-looking pizza place, and a bodega that sold lush flowers and copies of the New York Times.
“You seem to know your way,” Vega said.
“I actually interviewed for a job at Emory. I was a finalist, so I spent a few days at Tony’s place. I like the city.”
Tony was born and raised in Rio de Janeiro. His girlfriend, Luisa, was of Mexican descent, raised in Chicago. She had coppery hair and a warm smile and wore a white dress made out of T-shirt material that hung off one shoulder. On the drive, Vega had learned she was studying clinical psychology at Georgia Tech. Later, Vega overheard her ask Naomi about Daniel in a tone of genuine interest, and the fact of her concern made Vega like her.
There was Adrian, another filmmaker, who was also Brazilian. His boyfriend, Trenton, a trim Black man with a dancer’s posture who taught English and theater in Atlanta public schools. A cluster of anthropologists, all of whom seemed perfectly pleasant, contributed something to the spread on the table, and showered Tony with more congratulations.
“The Pulitzer Center did a write-up,” one of the anthropologists said. “They said he’s part of a new wave of human rights cinema.”
Tony wove his hands through his curly hair. “Look. This is the only thing I want to convey in my work. For centuries, we’ve been letting other people tell our stories. It’s our turn. The art we produce has to tell our stories.”
There was a murmur of agreement. Vega was still on her first sips of wine but was suddenly tired and disoriented. Most of the people in the room appeared to be around her age, in their late twenties or early thirties, but for some reason she felt old.
